Rise with SNP

Rise is a very comprehensive new offering from SAP for the move to SAP S/4 Hana and the shift to the cloud. There is no shame in not having a complete overview of this service offering - the SAP community with its numerous challenges and answers is too heterogeneous, too dynamic, too agile. SAP partner SNP has made a strategic virtue out of this necessity and built up a unique partner network. SNP CEO Michael Eberhardt, General Manager Central Europe Oliver Schwede and Vice President of Global Partner Management Lutz Lambrecht explain the SNP concept and partner network.

"After the outbreak of the pandemic, many manufacturers digitized their operations as quickly as possible", says Michelle Duerst, research vice president at Gartner, emphasizing: "While this is the right way to go, it is not enough."

Michael Eberhardt: "The Gartner analyst is absolutely right about that. It's not just hitting businesses, but more importantly, it's hitting our next generation in schools and universities. Certainly the pandemic was and is a trigger event to accelerate such changes."

The SAP community is holistically in S/4 transformation: is Rise with SAP the answer SAP existing customers currently need? "I would say Rise with SAP is one answer, but it's just one answer."explains SNP CEO Eberhardt and specifies: "We still see reluctance among the larger customers. These customers have the necessary infrastructure and structure to consume the individual elements of Rise in a more targeted way. In addition, a journey to the cloud needs to be looked at from multiple corners: It's about process optimization, data transparency, cost of ownership and reliance on individual vendors."

RISE with SAP

Oliver Schwede, General Manager Central Europe at SNP, says in an E-3 interview: "Rise with SAP includes business components such as process mining, as well as a new offering for moving to the cloud, S/4 Private Cloud Edition, PCE. With this offering, SAP is increasing customers' flexibility to run all or part of their SAP environment in the cloud, working with relevant hyperscalers."

The offer is commercially attractive for customers and offers advantages in the security area as well as new opportunities on the business side. SNP has already supported the first customers on their way to the Rise environment and offers ready-made solutions for this. SNP has specialized in data migration for 25 years and has almost 1,000 experts with extensive know-how.

Oliver Schwede on this: "We have mapped this knowledge in an intelligent software, our data transformation platform CrystalBridge. It enables a high degree of automation and quality assurance. Our business model is based on the idea of delegating recurring tasks to machines and letting humans take the lead. At the same time, our claim is that our software learns and thus enables the reusability of sets of rules. To avoid risk and scale resources, we have built in a Guided Procedure that allows customers and partners to deploy our CrystalBridge themselves."

For Michael Eberhardt, it is important that SNP can use the software to perform classic data transformations in the SAP environment faster, more securely and more efficiently. "With our CrystalBridge, we enable our customer to have transparency of their IT systems right from the start, which they have not known before"The SNP CEO knows this from numerous successful customer projects. "This allows our customers to make better decisions based on a real picture. It also provides our customers with benchmarks that help them look at the right solutions."

And Lutz Lambrecht, Vice President of Global Partner Management, adds: "We have further developed our CrystalBridge so that it can and should also be used by our customers and partners themselves. The software delivers projects to them with consistent quality and efficiency. To this end, in addition to software-based built-in quality checks, we have also developed an extensive range of training courses with corresponding certifications. And our support team assists our customers and partners at any time before, during and after a project. In this way, we ensure that the topic of data transformation can be crossed off the list of risk factors in the transformation project."

SNP has a very successful past as a competent partner of SAP-
Existing customers. The traditional partner business is undergoing a digital transformation, as is the entire community. Partnerships that function very successfully today would probably not have been conceivable just a few years ago. As a result, the partners' self-image has also changed - from IT system house with innovative products to consultant and trusted advisor.

Trusted Advisor

"SNP has earned its excellent reputation on the market through countless successful projects, both with international corporations and with medium-sized companies. The decisive factor here was that SNP's experts not only did their work with a high level of expertise and commitment, but at the same time also brought a high level of customer proximity and down-to-earthness."Oliver Schwede defines the successful SNP history.

In combination with the best optimal software platform available on the market, SNP became a specialist in the field of software-based data transformation.

"In this topic, our mission is to be a Trusted Advisor to our clients and help them make fact-based decisions"says the General Manager Central Europe. "Our expertise is instrumental in making the right decisions - and sometimes challenging existing opinions or approaches - in long-standing and costly transformations."

Michael Eberhardt explains in an E-3 interview: "We want to be an innovative, reliable and open partner for our customers and partners, especially for SAP. In my opinion, trust is the highest asset we have to earn every day."

Rise and SNP

As a trusted advisor, SNP is on an equal footing with SAP. How do SNP products fit in with SAP's Rise offering? "As an SAP partner, we have the same goal as SAP."says Oliver Schwede. "We want to bring customers quickly and securely to SAP S/4 Hana and unlock potential on the business and IT side. Our Rise offering was developed together with SAP for this goal, fits seamlessly into SAP's strategy and complements it."

And Michael Eberhardt on this: "As Oliver Schwede says, the goal is to get customers to SAP S/4 Hana as quickly as possible. This goal unites us with SAP alongside all of our shared, long-standing partnerships and the Selective Data Transformation (SDT) community."

Conversion and transformation

The S/4 transformation brings many challenges to existing SAP customers in the business, organizational, technical or licensing areas. Maintaining an overview does not seem easy, because even many successful SAP installations come with legacy issues and modifications.

The first question to be clarified is how much innovation and standardization on the process side should be achieved with the first step of a transformation to S/4, says Oliver Schwede. Here, wishes and possibilities have to be reconciled, because new functions and processes require trained personnel. The complexity of the technical conversion depends on this issue.

However, other factors also come into play, as SNP manager Schwede explains: "Which country or business unit should be migrated first? What does this mean for the following migrations? How can necessary preliminary projects be combined and how can the complete transformation be accelerated?"

It is thus obvious that SAP user companies and existing customers need a good plan that brings together business objectives and technical possibilities. Organizational and licensing issues are then derived from this.

"I still see that many customers can't properly assess the value of SAP S/4 Hana in part because the business and IT departments don't work closely enough together"says SNP CEO Michael Eberhardt. "It is our joint task to show our customers what benefits SAP S/4 Hana brings: I think that we all - SAP, the system integrators and partners like SNP - need to pull together even better. SAP user companies invest when they very clearly understand the sense, the ROI and also the risks. In my opinion, we are still sending too many different messages here."

The transformation to S/4 and Hana now knows many colors and concepts. SNP has created its own color, blue for Bluefield - how did this come about and what is behind it? "First of all, we are very proud that with Bluefield we have introduced an industry standard that is accepted in the market"explains Oliver Schwede. "In very many discussions with SAP customers, we heard and learned that neither a purely technical conversion nor a completely new start would be an option for them. This paved the way for a third approach after the brownfield and greenfield approaches."

SNP Bluefield

Bluefield stands for a comprehensive solution that offers SAP existing customers on their way to S/4 the possibility to implement hybrids from the pure color theory and to achieve the desired degree of innovation. This is made possible by the fact that Bluefield decouples the process and data levels, and the advantages of this migration approach can be used in Brownfield and Greenfield projects as well as in projects that, for example, do not want to do without historical data during a new implementation or want to combine several preliminary projects in one step.

Michael Eberhardt now knows from successful conversions that the Bluefield approach is the ideal form of migration for most SAP customers. "Not for new customers, but certainly for all existing customers"emphasizes the SNP CEO. True to the motto: Keep the Best - Transform the Rest. "We firmly believe that not everything in the past was bad, nor is everything outdated. Our motto is that customers should move to S/4, but focus on the topics where they see the greatest need to catch up. The SAP solution then serves them as a platform for a multi-year and probably permanent digital journey of change."CEO Eberhardt explains.

Future data transformation

How will SNP develop further? Following the sudden death of founder Andreas Schneider-Neureither last year, the direction of the successful group appeared uncertain in the short term.

Michael Eberhardt can reassure here: "Andreas already recognized how system-critical data is for successful transformations when he founded the company, and thus struck a nerve that is more important today than ever. That's why it was and remains our goal to support our customers in data transformations with a comprehensive software solution. An important goal is the speed with which customers can implement these transformations. Here, we are currently working together with customers on special procedures to keep business downtime to an absolute minimum."

The current acquisition also fits in perfectly with this. SNP CEO Eberhardt: "Our recent acquisition of SAP data specialist Datavard allows us to complement our portfolio with topics such as business warehouse and SAP BW/4, artificial intelligence and machine learning, business intelligence, data quality, and archiving or decommissioning of data. Today, we see ourselves as the market leader in SAP data transformation and management. We also develop solutions around data quality and ongoing topics such as monitoring of data, high performance connectors and many others. For the future, we have many ideas on how to make analysis and forecasting even more meaningful from existing knowledge and provide clear recommendations for the challenges of large transformation programs."

Vice President of Global Partner Management Lutz Lambrecht comments: "We will also increasingly involve our customers and partners in the further development of our software platform. The consolidated feedback helps us to always work close to the customer here." And in summary, Michael Eberhardt explains that all ideas are within the brand core of SNP and are therefore also in the spirit of its founder Andreas Schneider-Neureither.

It is becoming more and more apparent that the S/4 transformation has two principal streams: algorithms and data structures. With Signavio, SAP wants to renew the business processes, i.e. the algorithms. Many SAP partners are focusing on innovative master data management - so here the data structures are in the foreground. What takes priority in the S/4 conversion? Algorithms or data structures? New business processes based on outdated data structures make just as little sense as an optimal data basis as the basis of inefficient processes, Oliver Schwede knows. He explains: "When moving data, the full cycle must be considered - data migration, quality, master and metadata, governance and architecture. On the road to S/4, it is therefore important to develop a holistic data strategy. We all know by now how important mastery of data is to one's business success today."

Processes and data

Michael Eberhardt knows no either-or in the question of algorithms and data structures: "In a holistic view, the process level cannot be separated from the data level. Processes and data belong together. However, when customers migrate SAP systems, it is a great advantage if they can treat processes and data separately and then clearly superimpose them again later. We make use of this knowledge in the context of transformations."

In addition to its own experts, SNP has built up a global partner network. "We have completely revamped our partner strategy in 2020", says Oliver Schwede in this regard. SNP's goal was to achieve outsized organic growth through partners. "To do this, we have strengthened the area and taken it to a new level"Oliver Schwede, General Manager Central Europe, explains in retrospect.

His colleague Lutz Lambrecht explains: "To achieve this goal, we follow a clear partner-first strategy - unlike many software vendors. If a partner brings us to a customer, we will not compete with the partner under any circumstances. We are currently working intensively on partner enablement. We want to put our partners in an even better position to implement projects with the same performance and the same quality. We at SNP will then only provide support in quality assurance, depending on the level of training and experience in software use."

For all a way with SNP

"We want partners to commit to our SNP path and benefit from both our expertise and our software platform by applying it themselves and offering their own services to go with it"Oliver Schwede sees the future of SNP. "For our customers, this means high scalability of resources. Together with our partners, we thus ensure the often invoked bridge between business and technical expertise, which is so crucial for overall project success."

Michael Eberhardt summarizes: "Ultimately, with the help of these partnerships, we want to become the industry standard for SAP-related data transformation and data management. In addition, the partners help us to distribute our platform accordingly and raise awareness of our SNP brand."

Already during the presentation of Rise, SAP CEO Christian Klein showed that these are complex challenges that cannot be solved with one answer and one tool alone. The journey towards Hana and S/4 requires a lot of know-how and helping hands. So do the SNP partnerships also mean that the S/4 transformation exceeds the competence of an SAP partner and that the challenge can only be met together?

"On the journey to SAP S/4 Hana, our customers need a sustainable infrastructure of partners and a software platform that is able to learn and adapt"Oliver Schwede knows from numerous SAP projects. The mix of business and technical expertise is crucial. In most cases, there is no such thing as an "egg-laying willow sow" that can do everything. Rather, an alliance of partners is required, and Oliver Schwede specifies: "For many SAP customers, the transformation to SAP S/4 Hana is a real Herculean task. User companies facing such a challenge therefore very much appreciate competent partners and 'leading edge software'."

Michael Eberhardt defines it scientifically: "We see here the classic battle between Labor Arbitrage and Asset-Based Consulting. We stand for the latter, as this is the only way we can scale sufficiently and offer the greatest possible quality and security - with optimal efficiency. Our focus also helps our customers and partners."

One Face to the Customer

During his Rise presentation at the beginning of this year, SAP CEO Christian Klein said: "One Face to the Customer. So SAP would very much like to be the general contractor for all conversion and transformation projects, wouldn't it? "You'll have to ask Christian Klein that directly"says Oliver Schwede. "We see it as offering SAP customers a single point of contact across all necessary trades and agreeing the risk for a successful transformation directly with the manufacturer."

And Michael Eberhardt takes a very pragmatic view that in the end it is always the customer who decides. "And that's a good thing too"he emphasizes. "As mentioned earlier, the customer's consumption behavior also depends on his size. The smaller the customer, the more attractive the Rise offer."

Business and IT Transformation

SNP partners are positioned differently when it comes to data transformation in the context of business and IT transformations. "For some, it is important that we quickly enable them to deliver projects completely independently. Others want SNP to completely take over the topic of data transformation for them."Lutz Lambrecht knows from his professional experience. "With individual partners, we are building joint transformation factories."

These Transformation Factories yield the full range of data transformation services from analysis, transformation, testing to data management. "We are flexible here and can adapt to the specific requirements of the partner"Lambrecht emphasizes.

"In a nutshell, our customers benefit from our transformation expertise and our commitment to deliver the leading platform on the market with CrystalBridge"knows Oliver Schwede. "It allows our customers to implement projects faster, with less risk and more efficiently."

In conclusion, SNP CEO Michael Eberhardt: "At SNP, we are the leading consulting and software company for data transformations and data management in the SAP environment. Here, we are the heart specialist. Our customers can trust us because of our market leadership, our global partner network and our 25 years of experience."