ERP users today would rather focus on adopting processes rather than adapting to them as public cloud solutions like SAP S/4HANA have changed their mindset towards ERP implementation to one driven by business requirements rather than systems. Today, SAP partners like NTT DATA Business Solutions help organizations on this journey. The example of Amber Infrastructure’s journey to adopting SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud edition highlighted this aspect during an ERP Today webinar by NTT Data Business Solutions.
A case of building in the cloud
Amber Infrastructure (Amber) specializes in international infrastructure for both public and private sectors. Over the past 12 years, the company’s workforce has increased from 50 to around 200 employees, and it has expanded geographically to 16 to 17 countries. The company has grown tenfold in this period, which has also resulted in the growth of its finance function.
As the finance function grew, Amber’s biggest frustration revolved around the 550 legal entities in its structure. Due to its global operations, foreign exchange transactions were another pain point as Amber deals in about 20 different currencies. Financial reporting in all its geographies, including the UK and US, and getting one source for all its financial reporting was another challenge.
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However, the biggest drawback of their on-premise ERP system was highlighted after a discussion with people across the company’s finance function. The company realized that some of its best resources, its people, were spending too much time on mundane processes in a system that could be easily automated.
With the aim of future growth, the company relooked at its existing ERP system and chose SAP S/4HANA to help Amber resolve its challenges for the finance function and prepare for future growth. The company chose NTT Data Business Solutions as its implementation partner.
Why SAP S/4HANA
The first step was understanding Amber’s business needs and discovering what the system would do for them. SAP helped the organization with these aspects through S/4HANA public cloud’s digital discovery assessment (DDA).
This cloud-based tool enabled NTT Data Business Solutions to go through the process of understanding that discovery from the organization’s perspective. The DDA helped Amber define the system landscape, integrations, processes, and capabilities of their cloud solution in an upfront manner. NTT Data Business Solutions has further templated it according to the industry to serve as a blueprint for the scope of the solution it proposes. This allowed Amber to accelerate effectively through the first stages of their migration journey and deliver the solution quickly.
Once the scope was agreed upon after the DDA, the SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Manager tool read the scope and pushed it into Amber’s test environment through an automated process, speeding things up. After the system was tested, adoption was accelerated through bite-sized videos that users could easily understand.
Reaping the benefits
On implementing SAP S/4HANA, Amber was no longer looking at on-premise solutions but at SAP, owning the landscape for them and making the solution ready. Some other benefits that it experienced by moving to S/4HANA include:
Best practices processes: The solution is pre-configured and has best practice business processes built into it, which ease the organization’s process, value, and digital transformation journey.
Continuous innovation: S/4HANA drives change improvements, as SAP releases new versions around twice a year, so the user is on the latest version every year. This has helped Amber grow and scale with the latest advances in its business.
Scalable and secure solution: The solution allows the organization to start with a core scope and grow with new functions and features released in the upgrade while adding features and functions that are already available securely.
Ability to integrate: The SAP S/4HANA solution has many APIs and connections that allow the system to be integrated into the organization’s wider landscape.
AI-driven features: The use of AI in the SAP cloud offering has also changed the game. Robotic Process Automation (RPA), predictive analysis, and machine learning assist organizations in setting up and fine-tuning processes, enabling predictive scenarios for better forecasting, and helping users understand historical trends to make informed decisions. SAP’s Gen AI copilot Joule helps users by summarizing data, building reports, and running processes automatically, depending on the user’s query.
