Embrace - SAP and Microsoft: S/4 Hana with Azure

How do SAP and Microsoft support customers in innovation and transformation, or what is and means Embrace?

"Driving Innovation Together: The Intelligent Enterprise and the Intelligent Cloud" is the mission of the SAP and Microsoft partnership to best support customers, together with our partners, in digital transformation and innovation with integrated solutions and technologies from SAP and Microsoft. This mission is based on a decades-long technology partnership.

But the mutual customer relationship also plays an important role here. SAP runs 17 internal SAP system landscapes on Azure, Microsoft is one of SAP's largest customers and runs all SAP systems on Azure. So you can say "the best run SAP on Azure, like SAP and Microsoft".

In October 2019, SAP and Microsoft announced the joint Embrace initiative, a program to best support customers in their digital transformation.

The diverse integration of solutions and technologies across the SAP and Microsoft technology stacks now offers customers a unique innovation platform for the digital transformation journey.

The industry-specific Market Approved Journeys and the underlying reference architectures with solutions and technologies from SAP (Intelligent Enterprise Suite with S/4 Hana and SCP) and Microsoft (Azure Services, Modern Workplace) provide the ideal basis for planning and implementing the digital transformation.

For example, customers can benefit from the integration of Office365 and Teams in Fiori, the use of Azure AI and Azure IoT Services in SAP processes, the connection of Microsoft line-of-business solutions via ODI, or even the operation of SAP systems on Azure as an IaaS platform.

Another important element of Embrace is to support customers in migrating from today's ECC systems to S/4 Hana on Azure. Based on the SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) on Azure, customers can make enhancements and integrate 3rd party solutions in a coordinated technology platform.

This reduces complexity, project effort and costs. In addition, customers can now benefit from a partner network that is proficient in SAP and Microsoft technologies, enabling customers to exploit the full potential of the innovation platform.

Thus, the close partnership between SAP and Microsoft, the competent partner environment and the very well integrated products and technologies represent the innovative and future-proof platform for digital transformation.

Why do SAP customers choose S/4 Hana - if we disregard the fact that standard maintenance for SAP Business Suite has only been promised until 2025?

SAP Business Suite, or rather its predecessor SAP R/3, could be conceived as an ERP system clearly specialized in the management of business transactions.

Manual, partially non-integrated processes, waiting times, lack of overview of the current situation when, for example, ad hoc decisions have to be made, lack of collaboration as well as cumbersome work are challenges that still exist.

Although SAP Business Suite offers extensive functionality, it is still in the tradition of applications from the 1990s.

SAP S/4 Hana eliminates all these weaknesses. Thus, for the first time, it is possible to analyze what is happening in the company while at the same time any number of employees are generating data in the system.

With S/4 Hana, the ERP system becomes the basis of the Intelligent Enterprise - as its central nervous system. This allows the scheduling of purchasing, warehousing and production to "breathe" flexibly with fluctuations in demand - at reduced costs.

Employees can focus on the special cases and the particularly important processes that the system shows them. Services that support digital business models can be mapped much more easily in the system.

The opportunities offered by SAP S/4 Hana also extend to IT, where SAP landscapes that have grown over many years usually cause more work than necessary.

When switching to S/4 Hana, standard functionality is now used much more consistently because SAP provides preconfigured functionality (Best Practices and Model Company). Differentiating proprietary developments will still be necessary.

However, these can be implemented separately from the realease-proof standard software on the SAP Cloud Platform, which our customers also find on Azure.

Now combine this with the capabilities of Azure as a platform for the cloud, and the result is a trend that has captured companies across all industries and spans three areas:

• Transformation of the business model in subareas or the entire company
• Reducing the complexity of SAP applications
• Use of the cloud

The bottom line is IT modernization that enables growth and reduces costs at the same time. Here, companies can decide which investments they have made in their SAP system so far they want to maintain in the future and where they want to go in new directions.

How many customers have already made the move to SAP S/4 Hana and how many are still hesitating?

To date, 3900 customers are already live worldwide, well over 6000 customers have an ongoing project, and SAP's partners are already reporting staff shortages in the face of increasing demand for SAP S/4 Hana project services.

According to a DSAG study from January 2019, around 80 percent of all SAP customers in Germany are already planning to switch to SAP S/4 Hana - and the trend is rising.

This is remarkable, because we are talking about ERP projects here, which usually affect the heart of the company. But SAP and the partner ecosystem stand ready to ensure that no customer is left behind in their transformation.

How does SAP help companies plan their path to SAP S/4 Hana?

We support each company with our partners to develop an individual roadmap for the conversion to SAP S/4 Hana.

The linchpin here is the corporate goals and the strategic investment priorities derived from them. This provides the framework for the system conversion to be planned.

This individual work is supported by free services from SAP, which our customers can call up as an accompaniment. On the one hand, this is the analysis of which opportunities SAP S/4 Hana offers for the business processes supported today in the ERP system (Business Scenario Reporting).

Secondly, the analysis in which used transactions the technical conversion of the existing SAP system to S/4 Hana could generate project effort (readiness check).

Above all, however, this is the Adoption Starter Service, in the context of which we accompany the use of these reports with experts in such a way that SAP customers can carry out concrete roadmap planning.

This service is provided via conference calls by a central team and extends over one to three months, depending on how extensively one wishes to use this service.

SAP is constantly evolving these services to consistently deliver on our promise that no customer is left behind.