Plaut Australia’s Andrew Simmons asks, how can you recommend to others what you are not prepared to do yourself?
S/4HANA, cloud, private cloud, on-premise, IoT, Leonardo, blockchain – confused? You’re not the only one! We were too. So, rather than just jump on the bandwagon, Plaut decided to be its own customer and undertake the journey to S/4HANA cloud ourselves. Because, how could we ever recommend to our customers what we weren’t prepared to do ourselves?
First – ask yourself, where do all these fit in my ERP strategy and do I even need to have a cloud strategy? So much is happening that it is difficult to keep track of where and how your business should move forwards.
We understand this process, largely because we have just completed it ourselves. There is no better way to understand a process than to do it yourself. We just replaced our own off-the-shelf accounting system which we outgrew several years ago (if not a whole decade!). Over the years, we had built our own project management, expense management and time sheeting applications and just connected these systems together as we went. We had created a massive burden on manual processes surrounded by human interfaces. So much of our capability was held in the mind of individuals.
After a significant review of options, we implemented S/4HANA Cloud and already have one fully integrated business system that is ready for innovation.
At the same time, Plaut created a dedicated practice for S/4HANA. A practice that has developed and implemented one of SAP’s first global installations. In recognition of our success and knowledge, we are the lighthouse Partner for Australia and New Zealand, the only partner certified to deliver the SAP Public Cloud edition of S/4HANA.
We are currently assisting many clients to take this opportunity to align their systems to the changing business climate. How do we do this?
First, we conduct a ‘THINK’ phase to review current systems in order to recommend an integrated platform across your enterprise, to meet current and future demands. This is a key part of working with Plaut – accessing our deep expertise across ERP to understand whether cloud is really the right path for you.
We will help you to identity the end to end flow of your processes and determine their fit to best practice. In parallel, we understand if these are built as a business differentiator to make your business unique and stand out from the competition.
It is these business differentiators that we make sure are at the forefront of a business transformation program. In this way, your system supports you to sustainably drive your business forward and continually evolve with your industry, keeping you competitive.
Your ERP is a commodity; we will align to best practice, making your business more efficient, taking advantage of the mature SAP landscape. We will also create an innovation platform so that you can move rapidly to adapt to change and lessen the burden on ageing hardware and out of date business systems.
It’s the old 80/20 rule; with an ERP, 80 per cent of the SAP user base would only use 20 per cent of functionality. We all know SAP is a complex business solution and was born from the complexities required across such a diverse range of business models serving the globe across a multilingual and global economy.
The language explained – S/4HANA
SAP is simplifying. User experience is key, if the system is not intuitive, available across all your devices, anywhere, anytime then it will not be a system of use moving forward.
S/4HANA is SAP’s 4th generation (hence S/4), taking advantage of the 40-year-old SAP application, rewritten from the ground-up.
This unified platform is referred to as the digital core. ‘’Core’’ meaning that all the functionality we expect to be available is now within the one central application including;
- Procure to Pay
- Order to Cash
- Core Financials
- Plan to Product
- Predictive Analytics and Reporting
No longer will we use the ERP platform as a development environment to create and develop business differentiators. For the first time ever, SAP provides an independent development platform, SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) providing:
- A platform as a service (PaaS)
- HANA Database & Analytics (may use non HANA)
- Open source development environment
- Cloud identity management
- API management (integration)
Interested?
To take complete advantage of this new digital core, we recommend a business transformation program be implemented. To enable you and your team we have several options to assist you along your journey. We are now offering a technical and functional analysis with an SAP roadmap as the deliverable. This will provide the following services within a 4-6 week period:
- Technical landscape assessment
- Custom code analysis
- High level functional overlay to S/4HANA
- Platform and deployment model recommendation
To take advantage of our own real experience and let us help you to determine the best solution for you click here. Think HANA. Think Plaut. Think.
This is a sponsored article from Plaut Australia.
Andrew Simmons is SAP HANA Practice Lead, Plaut Australia. Simmons is responsible for engaging with Plaut’s clients to determine and develop their HANA programmes. One of very few HANA experts in Australia, Simmons was the technical program director for the NSW Department of Education. He successfully completed the first SAP Suite on HANA implementation at the Department of Human Services. In addition, he led a $300 million transformation project at Transport for NSW. Simmons holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Technology, Sydney. He is an internationally certified Rescue Diver and Dive Master.
